Ramblings of a Graduate Student

Thanks to the hard work by Carnegie Mellon Civil Engineering student, Nick Doiron, I am pleased to announce that a method of efficiently moving the 1000+ photographs from email to Google Maps has been found!  The website that will host all of the Snow Shot of America photographs can be viewed here: Snow Shot of America.  Please know that we are still debugging and testing things so expect some problems in the short term.  With this said, photographs should begin to start appearing in the coming days.  It will take a while to get through all of them, but through the website above, people can start to view the photographs just as soon as they have been uploaded.

If you have any suggestions or notice any problems, please don’t hesitate to let me know via the comments!

Lastly, Laban West of Yukon, OK has provided me with this overview image displaying photographs from each state in a single image.  Thanks, Laban!

I have received compliments about the success of this project from all over the world. However, the truth is that something of this magnitude could never have happened alone. I am forever indebted to the individuals across the United States who, in the midst of these trying times, took time out of their busy lives to take a photograph and send an email to someone they probably have never met and quite possibly never will. To those who have contributed, or merely just wished me well, from the bottom of my heart, thank you very much. If we ever cross paths in the future, please consider taking a moment and introducing yourself. I really would like to meet as many of the individuals as possible who have helped make this project a success.

As much as I would love to take credit for coming up with the idea behind Snow Shot of America, I would be remiss if I did not share credit with Missouri based photographer, Alexis Norin.  She first mentioned how cool it would be to get a picture of the snow in all 50 states.  It was this comment that inspired me to try and make that a reality.  This was the birth of what has now become the Snow Shot of America project.

Also, Tom & Matt Geballe, Greg Warren, and Dan Birchall deserve a ton of credit for their willingness to trek down the side of Mauna Kea’s steep north slope to document what snow remained from November and December snows in Hawaii.

I owe a big thank you to my lovely wife, Sarah, for putting up with me these past 48 hours.  Only someone with your kind of patience could have dealt with such a stressed and frazzled husband.  Thank you.

Lastly, thanks must be given to each and every person who helped spread the word about this project.  Without your help, the rapid dissemination of information regarding this project that had to happen for it to be a success never would have happened.  This truly was/is a country-wide project.

Now that I have photographs from all 50 states, I am being asked, “What’s next?”.  To begin, I have put together a slideshow containing at least one photograph or webcam picture from every state and that can be viewed here.  Next, I will begin what I imagine will be a relatively slow process of processing all the emails I have received of snow from all across the United States. At last count I had received almost 875 unique emails (this does not count replies and multiple emails sent with the same subject) and am still receiving more as I type this.  As I go through the emails and download the photographs (not to mention attempting to give as much credit to the individuals who took the photographs as possible), I hope to be able to respond personally to everyone who submitted a photograph.  This will take some time, so if you submitted a photograph, please do not take offense if it takes a while to hear back from me.  There is only one of me, and hundreds of you.

I still plan on trying to put all of the photographs into some sort of apparatus that would allow people to see where each photo was taken.  Initially, I intended this to be a Google Earth KML file, but based on the number of photographs I have received, this file would end up being very large and take a very long time to download.  I’m still trying to work out the exact logistics of the final product, but I promise to give periodic updates on the progress.  I will certainly make an announcement when major milestones are achieved and when the final product is completed.

The Snow Shot of America project has been a huge whirlwind for me. What started off as a single Tweet on Thursday has grown into a project that has touched all 50 states, our nation’s capital, Canada, Europe, and Australia.  I have learned a lot of valuable lessons from this project such as to respect the power of social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, and personal blogs; to appreciate the value of public radio in reaching a wide audience; and to stand in awe of the countless citizens of this country who will help a complete stranger achieve his or her goal.  However, of all the lessons I have learned from this project, the most important lesson is to never completely give up hope when you believe in something.  If there is a will, it will find a way – and there will be others along the way to lend a helping hand.

Thank you.

“…But an America that’s tired of being the world’s policeman, and is too pinched to be the world’s philanthropist, could still be the world’s partner. And you can’t do that without being, well, loved…The British want to be admired; the Russians, feared; the French, envied. (The Irish, we just want to be listened to.) But the idea of America, from the very start, was supposed to be contagious enough to sweep up and enthrall the world.

And it is. The world wants to believe in America again because the world needs to believe in America again. We need your ideas — your idea — at a time when the rest of the world is running out of them.”

–Bono, U2

Full article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/opinion/18bono.html?_r=5

For the past two years I have *theoretically* been working on a PhD dissertation in the realm of climate change science – namely, investigating the potential affects of anthropogenic climate change on severe thunderstorm environments.  My advisers have been world-renowned scientists in either climate change or severe thunderstorm environments.  The downside to all of this is that one of my advisers now lives in Australia, and the other is a scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.  Both of these scientists are incredibly busy and it makes things difficult for a graduate student needing mentorship and guidance.

All of that is background information to justify my recent decision to change my dissertation topic.  I’m leaving the climate change sciences (for the time being) and coming back to my true love…severe thunderstorms and tornadoes.  I don’t have a specific topic at the moment, but I do have a general area I’d like to do research – southeast US, cool-season severe weather events.  To the non-meteorologists, this might seem a bit boring, but it is actually one of the more fascinating, and incredibly difficult / complex problems remaining in severe thunderstorm and tornado forecasting.  A disproportionate number of tornado fatalities occur in the southeast United States, most occurring in what is typically referred to as the “cool-season” (roughly late October through March). (The 5 February 2008 Super Tuesday tornado outbreak is a perfect example of a southeast US cool-season tornado outbreak – 55 fatalities in 4 states).  There is a lot of speculation as to why there is such a high number of fatalities (socio-economic reasons, nighttime tornadoes, etc), but none of this speculation helps with improving forecast skill in these areas, and almost certainly doesn’t matter to the residents affected by these events.

My current plan is to spend the next month or two identifying exactly what are some of the problems in forecasting these events, and then write a short 10-15 page summary of my findings and what I plan to do to address the scientific questions I raise.  After this, I’ll present a seminar to the National Weather Center detailing my findings, and hopefully announce what I plan to specifically address for my PhD.  Thus, over the next few weeks I’ll talk to my friends at the Storm Prediction Center and seek the source of some of their frustrations regarding these cool-season events, read National Weather Service Service Assessment reports on known events, and read a lot of journal articles.

I can’t wait to begin…

The armada spent the night in Enid, OK after yesterday’s squall line deployment.  Today, a down day, was spent traveling to the central portion of tornado alley where the armada will run practice drills over the next few days in preparation for deployment late in the week.

Since today was a down day, I spent the day working on things around the duplex that I was planning on putting off until the end of the summer.  It was nice to “get away” from VORTEX II and get these things done.  Tomorrow looks to be a down day as well so hopefully I’ll cross a few more things off my to-do list!

Sorry, there won’t be a VORTEX II update tonight.  The armada chased some interesting storms today and the VORTEX II Operations Center has been under a tornado warning for the past hour or so.  I’ll do a formal debrief tomorrow morning and give the account of what happened!

Even though I’m here looking out for the armada, the storms are chasing me!

Today marks the ten year anniversary of the second most important event that shaped my interest in meteorology.  Sixty-six tornadoes struck Kansas and Oklahoma in an eight hour period.  (The following day there were several more tornadoes, including an F4 an hour from where I grew up.)  The strongest of the tornadoes on this day went through Bridge Creek, Moore, and souther Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  This F5 tornado caused over $1 billion in insured damages (the entire outbreak caused ~ $1.5 billion) and was the first tornado to ever have a “Tornado Emergency” issued for it.  The image below was compiled by the National Weather Service Office in Norman, OK.  It displays the path and intensity of all the tornadoes in Oklahoma that day.  You can read more about this event by clicking here.

For those interested in what the number one event that shaped my meteorological destiny, it was the 21 April 1996 tornado that struck Fort Smith and Van Buren, AR around 11PM at night.  This tornado caused two fatalities – both were under the age of 5.  Residents of Fort Smith still complain about the lack of receiving the tornado warning that was issued.  Read the NWS Service Assessment of this storm here.